Wikileaks continues to be offline...

By

Joseph George

PublishedMonday, August 13, 2012

Wikileaks has been attacked and has gone offline for the second day in a row. The most popular website that exposes secret classified documents says it has been a victim of a sustained denial of service (DdoS) attack.

The website that claims to have taken investigative journalism to new levels and excelled where traditional media have miserably failed released a new set of information on the Trapwire Surveillance System that has been exposed by hackers who call themselves Anonymous. The website has also been posting documents and emails on the conflict in Syria.

While the problem first emerged on August 3 when Wikileaks tweeted through its official twitter account that “WikiLeaks.org is down for unknown reasons. We are investigating. wikileaks.org<http://wikileaks.org> is still up.”

In the UAE anyone trying to logon to WikiLeaks or any of its mirror sites are redirected to an empty page that simply reads, “A communication error occurred: "Operation timed out" The Web Server may be down, too busy, or experiencing other problems preventing it from responding to requests. You may wish to try again at a later time.

The attacks coincided with WikiLeaks' release of new information on the Trapwire surveillance system discussed by Stratfor, the US-based global intelligence firm that hacker collective Anonymous infiltrated late last year to steal roughly five million emails.

Wikileaks in a statement yesterday said the initial assault started in the beginning of August and has intensified to include affiliated sites.

According to reports quoting DDoS attacks occur when there is an overwhelming increase in the requests for information by several thousand domains making the traffic too slow. WikiLeaks has said it's been flooded with 10 gigabits per second of bogus traffic from thousands of different Internet addresses.